The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Sieve Extension: Variables ' <draft-ietf-sieve-variables-08.txt> as a Proposed Standard This document is the product of the Sieve Mail Filtering Language Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Scott Hollenbeck and Ted Hardie. A URL of this Internet-Draft is: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-sieve-variables-08.txt Technical Summary In advanced mail filtering rule sets, it is useful to keep state or configuration details across rules. This extension to the filtering language Sieve changes the interpretation of strings, adds an action to store data in variables, and supplies a new test so that the value of a string can be examined. This document updates RFC 3028. Working Group Summary The discussion about adding variables to the SIEVE mail filtering language started 4-5 years ago during development of the IMAP flags extension to SIEVE. The latter has been using a single implicit global variable and several mailing list participants have expressed their wish to have a more generic method of keeping state or configuration details across rules. The ability to extract matching material from header fields and perform further tests on it has also proven to be very useful. This became even more apparent when the SIEVE regular expression draft was written. The document is minimalistic in its approach: several less used features like automatically set current date/time variables got dropped from the document. There was a discussion about having read-only variables automatically set from different RFC 2822 message headers. There was no consensus to add this to the document. There was a discussion about having locally scoped variables. The general feeling was that this feature complicates implementations quite a bit for a feature very few Sieve scripts will find use for. So there was no consensus to add this to the document, however, should the need arise, it would be possible to add locally scoped variables as an extension. Several WG members have proposed adding associative arrays. Some people felt that this might be useful, but it will introduce extra implementation complexity and could lead to implementation bugs. The WG has decided that this can be postponed till later; the current "variables" document doesn't prohibit this. Protocol Quality The WG asked the Security Area to perform a review of the document. Two changes to the document has been done as the result of the review: additional text in Security Considerations about silent truncation of big values and an additional :quotewildcard modifier which gives a convenient way to escape special matching characters in strings. Both changes were discussed in details on the mailing list and have WG consensus behind them. There are already several implementations of the variables extension in servers and more people have indicated that they are planning to implement it. Scott Hollenbeck has reviewed this specification for the IESG. Love Hornquist Astrand and Jeffrey Hutzelman performed a security review of the document. Note to the RFC Editor Please remove Section 0 from the document. _______________________________________________ IETF-Announce@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce
